There was no father in the front seat driving too slowly, no one to marvel with over how small the fingers were, no one to be nervous with.

Just my sister’s careful hands on the wheel and my daughters’ car seats empty beside me because they were already at Romina’s, and my son asleep in the seat his father had installed weeks earlier, back when he was still our son, back before a mark the size of a thumbnail.

I looked out the window at the ordinary streets going by and understood that I was not being driven home.

I did not have a home to be driven to.

I was being driven somewhere safe, which is a different and lonelier thing, and I held my son’s foot through the blanket the whole way and made him a promise I have kept: that wherever the two of us ended up, it would be a place where he was wanted out loud, every single day, by someone who never once needed proof.

Chapter 5 — My Sister’s Door